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Using Site Maps Correctly

I'm looking to submit a sitemap for a post driven site with over 5000 pages.

The site hasn't got a sitemap but it is indexed by google - will submitting a sitemap make a difference at this stage?

Also, most free sitemap tools only go up to 5000 pages, and I'm thinking I would try a sitemap using a free version of the tool before I buy one - If my site is 5500 pages but I only submit a sitemap for 5000 (I have no control of which pages get included in the sitemap) would this have a negative effect for the pages that didn't get included?

3 Responses

It would definitely be better to submit a complete sitemap. If your site is built in Wordpress, Joomla, Magento, or many other standard CMS, it should have the ability to generate a full sitemap. Plugins like Yoast or Google Sitemaps help. Just depends on the site.

Otherwise you can probably get any pro SEO or agency to create a full 5500+ sitemap for you for $100 bucks or so. :) PM me if you need more help.

First there are two specific terms and you never, never ever should forget them. They are - crawling and indexing. Once you prepare sitemap and submit there (or include in robots.txt) all bots get some map of your site and start crawling pages based on their crawling budget for your site. In crawling process they MAY find new pages that doesn't include in this map and will crawl them too. Again this is based on your crawling budget.

So when you submit sitemap - bot will get within seconds list of "non-crawled" 5000 pages and will start crawl them. Then he can find missed 500 pages and will crawl them too. Tricky is that when you update sitemap - he can detect quick changes there and start recrawling them again. But for missed 500 pages he can visit you again to check them for changes. And this will be also under your crawling budget. But if pages there isn't changed often - isn't big deal.

So you shouldn't hesitated about negative impact there. Only negative impact can happen if you have some serious URL architecture issues and messy URLs there. Then submitting partial sitemap can obfuscate this issues and some of your URLs to remain non-crawled.

Technically in SearchConsole you can see sitemap statistics like submitted and indexed. In perfect world numbers should be almost equal with little difference. But if you see huge difference between them - then you're in trouble. For example - on some site i have sitemap with submitted 44,950 pages and indexed of them was 29,643. This is pure example site crawling troubles or sitemap troubles. Because 1/3 of all pages isn't indexed at all.

PS: I forgot. You should use own CMS plugin for generating sitemap inside. Even if your CMS was custom made you should write (or hire someone) to create plugin inside. It's near 20-30 lines of write-here-your-favorite-language (PHP/Python/Perl/Ruby) and isn't big deal. This plugin will minimize crawling time from 3rd party sitemap generator tool because CMS already have all information inside and just need to be exported to XML.

Submitting a sitemap in Webmaster Console is always a good idea at any stage. If your website URLs are crawled and indexed in search engines than there will be no negative impact of it but in the longer run if you add more pages sitemap will defiantly a help.

If you are using CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Zencart or any other they all have extensions and plugins in their directory that will help you generate the sitemap of your current site and will add links as soon as you will add more pages.

Rest peter explains almost everything in detail like if you have URL issues and issues with crawling and indexing.

If you have a custom CMS, I think you should seriously consider the idea by Peter as this is something you need on regular basis anyways!

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